Townsvile Deployment

Well all 16 of us left on the Thursday from Brisbane airport which was fun. 

 

If we didn’t know each other before then – we certainly did afterwards.

 

When we arrived at Townsville airport we were greeted then we went back to the hotel and we had a small talk of what had been happening before we had arrived.

 

Then the next day we went to the fire station where we were getting our trucks and ourselves organized. 

 

From then, three trucks went one way and the other three went a different way. 

 

Our three trucks went and patrolled a line that they had done a back burn on the night before.

 

Whilst we were doing that we had a priority call about 11am to houses under threat by a grass fire so the three units we had in our group all turned out to this  grass fire which felt like it was at least 10 kms from were we were patrolling.  

 

When we were coming down this road towards the grass fire all I could see was this big black mushroom cloud and it was it the quickest running fire I have ever seen. 

 

We tried to put some of it out but it was just spotting 20m in front of us and we couldn’t stop it. 

 

In the end we ended up back burning. By the end of all the back burning operations that we thought had to be done and using air support for some stuff it was roughly 150 ha in size. 

 

All of a sudden it broke out somewhere so by then the air support had gone so we had to put in another back burn which controlled it finally. 

 

The entire fire ending up being  200 ha. 

 

 

You know it just wouldn’t have worked if we all didn’t work together and if we didn’t find out the local knowledge. 

 

It doesn’t matter what region you come from – we are all volunteers in the Rural Fire Service and it is the same across the state.

 

 

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